citizen kane
ROSEBUD! The classic masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), is undoubtedly one of the most famous and highly acclaimed films in history. Stemming from the °Hollywood¯s America± genre of films, as detailed in Setting the Scene: The Great Hollywood Art Directors, Citizen Kane blew away audiences with its many remarkable scenes, cinematic and narrative techniques, innovations, and art direction. The director, star, and producer were all the same individual - Orson Welles (in his film debut at age 25), who collaborated with Herman J. Mankiewicz on the script and with Gregg Toland as cinematographer. Within the maze of its own aesthetics, Citizen Kane develops two interesting themes. The first concerns the debasement of the private personality of the public figure, and the second deals with the crushing weight of materialism. Taken together, these two themes comprise the bitter irony of an American success story that ends in futile nostalgia, loneliness, and death. It seems as though the personal theme developed verbally through the characters while the materialistic theme developed visually, through the use of various camera angles and scenery, creating a distinctive stylistic counterpoint. It is against the counterpoint that the t
In all respects, the numerous techniques used in Citizen Kane are a reflection and projection of the inhuman quality of its protagonist. In the way the techniques are used to distort and magnify the characters in the film, we understand what the film is trying to get across. Citizen Kane represents an intense vision of American life, a life in which materialistic elements are distorted and magnified at the expense of human potentialities. The implied absence of free will in the development of Kane's character is thematically constant with the moral climate of his environment. As the techniques used have not been limited in form, so too, Kane's magnitude unchecked by limiting principles or rooted traditions, become the cause of spiritual. It is the implementation of such unlimited filmmaking techniques that help make Citizen Kane the absolute masterpiece that audiences have come to cherish. Its theme is told from several perspectives by several different characters and is thought provoking. The tragic story is how a millionaire newspaperman, who idealistically made his reputation as the champion of the underprivileged, becomes corrupted by a lust for wealth, power and immortality. Kane's tragedy lies in his inability to experience any real emotion in his human relationships. The apparent intellectual superficiality of Citizen Kane can be traced to the shallow quality of Kane himself. Even when Kane is seen as a crusading journalist battling for the lower classes, overtones of self-idolatry mar his actions. His clever ironies are more those of the exhibitionist than the crusader. His second wife complains that Kane never gave her anything that was part of him, only material possessions that he might give a dog. His best friend, Jedediah Leland, was a detached observer functioning as a sublimated conscience remarks to the reporter that Kane never gave anything away: "he left you a tip". In each case, Kane's ch
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Approximate Word count = 1305
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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